For Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Part 1)

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One day our fore fathers sat down and began to write one of the most amazingly inspired documents this great country of ours has ever seen. It started something like this:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. This was the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States.

The Constitution was written by several committees in the summer of 1787, but the committee most responsible for the final form we know today is the “Committee of Style and Arrangement”. This Committee was formed and charged with getting all of the articles and clauses of the document agreed to by the Convention, and putting them into a logical order. On September 10, 1787, the Committee of Style set to work, and two days later, it presented the Convention with its final draft the Constitution of the United States of America. The members were Alexander Hamilton, William Johnson, Rufus King, James Madison, and Governor Morris.

These forefathers, or, “The Framers” as they were known, were an elite group, the best of the best. They were considered some of the most brilliant men of the time. Because the formation of the Constitution of the United States would put governmental control over people’s rights and liberties, in essence their lives, the Preamble was written in order to help the common man feel comfortable with the new legislation represented in the document which would become the, “Law of the Land” so to speak. Remember during this same time the States were still un-united and battling over territorial rights, slavery issues, taxation, and so on. These Framers wanted to put an end to rebellion and establish peace and security for the countrymen without the need for war amongst the states via unification of the country by the formation of the United States of America.

I was eleven years old when I first read the Preamble and it touched me so deeply that I immediately sat down at a table and began to write the words of the Preamble down so that I could memorize them. They seemed so full of love and respect, each man for another; I just had to feel a part of this grand idea. I wanted to make it a part of me and so that night I actually did memorize the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States of America of my own free will, without it having to be a class assignment. I fell in love with three concepts listed in that writing on that day; one was Life, the other was Liberty, and the third, of course, our individual right for the Pursuit of Happiness. The reason I did this was because I was a young girl watching soldier’s die on television in the Vietnam war.

Television, being newly released to the public during that time, was a new invention that could unite reality to its visualization, (LIVE), for the first time in our country. I had never seen men carrying guns and falling to the ground – it scared me. What really scared me about seeing this on T.V. was that I did not know our world was so full of hate and violence. I could not believe that people actually would go to war and kill each other over an idea. That realization caused me to search for, and struggle to find a higher conviction, a higher cause, a higher power. I thought the security and individual rights of all people were guaranteed within our government. Our government was my SUPER HERO; but because of the Viet Nam war I was struggling with the idea that our government was actually forcing people to go to another country to kill and be killed. Wasn’t this document supposed to stop and prevent that need through mutual respect and agreement?

Now jump forward thirty years and look at where we are today. We have seen beheadings in Iran, Korea and Iraq arming themselves with the production of plutonium and nuclear capabilities, religious disputes between the Irish Protestants and Catholics in Ireland and other areas of the UK leading to the deaths of individual lives on each side; and in our own country there has been talk of reinstating the draft so that more people can go to other countries in order to protect our home soil from militant terrorists.

What ever happened to the concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? It seems, more and more as time goes by, that society is becoming increasingly more violent and threatening. This sense of perceived threat and violence has caused many people to arm themselves as civilians as if preparing for battle. Are we to live just to arm ourselves in defense of our lives so as to prevent our deaths? Or, are we going to fight to the death, if you will, to save our lives? If this is how we must live today, how can we truly find happiness? Are we happy?